iDevGames v3

In case you haven't noticed, I've been working a bunch on the site over the past week and a half. I still have a few more days worth of work to do and more things to reveal when they're done, but for now, basically it's a layout/design overhaul everywhere including the forums.

There are still some small style clashes, mostly in the forums. Changing the forums style is a major pain and very tedious, so it's a lot of work to do it all. At any rate, some more things will surely be tweaked, but your kind feedback is welcomed.

One thing to note is that I'm ditching support for older browsers. At the moment the site has a bunch of gradients and shadows and things which will only work in modern browsers, so I have no idea how it looks in IE at the moment, but in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all is well, which is all we (I) care about. If you see something that's broken or strange, let me know.

Secondly, a minor bug report: the link in the username at the top of the forum – eg. "Welcome back, sealfin" – is broken; the link should be "user-user number.html" but is instead just "user number" – eg. "http://www.idevgames.com/forums/21" instead of "http://www.idevgames.com/forums/user-21.html"

Something that looks a bit off though is the "Possibly Related Threads..." section that appears at the bottom of some threads (like here). Mostly the square corners, but also the header color seems slightly different (brighter and/or more saturated).

The new theme hides the time/date of the last post, which is how I decide what I want to read. I don't mind sticking with the older theme if that is a design decision, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

(Aug 30, 2012 06:51 AM)backslash Wrote: The new theme hides the time/date of the last post, which is how I decide what I want to read. I don't mind sticking with the older theme if that is a design decision, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Hmm. I really thought no one would be using that, because it's a lot easier to just click View New Posts. You really browse through the forums to find new posts?

It's gotta be some kind of browser interaction issue. It doesn't work for Brian either but it has always worked for me. If I haven't visited for 5 days, it shows me the new posts on those 5 days. If visited about an hour ago and there have been no new posts, it shows me nothing. I'm not sure what the window is when it stops showing you the previous results and starts showing empty results. It might be as little as five minutes, so you have to click it and open everything in tabs, not click New read an entire thread, go back to New etc.

I'll add a timestamp column back in. Question though: is it important to you to see who posted? You don't really care, do you? (I'm just trying to reduce clutter.)

I like to see who posted. Sometimes a post I might otherwise overlook might grab my attention if it is from someone interesting.

On the "view new posts" link: That has been buggy for me on and off for well over a year now. Doesn't appear to matter what computer, OS or browser I'm using. It used to always show the unread posts since my last visit, but now sometimes it only shows a few or none when in reality there are lots of unread posts. I rely on that link because I don't often have time to browse around for unread posts. It has definitely impacted my participation in the forum. I reported this behavior when it started a long time ago but Seth said he didn't know what to say about it.

iDevGames footer link is very very small (Windows Chrome.) Can you post the browser/platform breakdown from Google Analytics. One thing to pass on is, while we may want to concentrate on Mac browsers, you don't want to discourage any visitor. Would be good to check the site on mobile devices as well.

It's not about Mac vs Windows. It's about modern vs old. Everything should look fine in IE9+, once the -ms prefix is added along with webkit and moz for all of the newer CSS things. I just haven't bothered yet. About 3% are IE9, and about 2% is IE8. Other versions are like 0.1% combined. I haven't added the -opera prefix easier. The only thing they're missing is some gradients and things which they always have been missing.

As for New Posts — short of reading the actual code and trying to get my hands dirty in the php to debug it (bleh), yeah…